A perceptive and articulate young psychologist’s revealing memoir of ten years on Prozac, with all its blessings and curses. If Slater’s first book, empathetic stories about her patients, Welcome to My Country (1996), was remarkable for its self-revelations, this one is even more so. When Slater began taking Prozac in 1988, she was an intelligent but unemployed 26-year-old with obsessive-compulsive disorder and a long history of hospitalizations for depression, self-mutilation, and anorexia. Prozac changed her life. Despite the drug’s slow-acting nature, within nine days she felt well, and the difficult job of learning to live a normal life began for her. While she felt it suppressed her energies, curiosity, and creativity, she discovered that her life became “quiet but rich, a fine piece of music by Mozart.” She established a real home for herself, completed a doctoral program in record time, became a psychologist, director of a clinic, and a writer, and she fell in love. Long-term use eventually led to what she terms a “poop-out,” and Prozac became “a well-meaning buddy whose presence can considerably ease pain but cannot erase it.” Perhaps Slater’s deepest regret about her dependence on Prozac for a normal life is the effect it has had on her sexuality, a subject she explores with great frankness and considerable grace. She also ponders the question of what Prozac in fact does: is it a sort of psychic steroid providing a competitive edge in life? Or is it, rather, a conduit to what Jung called the essential self? For Slater it has undoubtedly allowed her to become the person she is—a psychologist with a keen sense of what it feels like to suffer the agonies of mental illness. Fortunately, despite her fears, it doesn—t appear to have seriously dampened her creativity. Heartfelt but never mawkish; eloquent but never slick; a lyrical account of a drug that has caused mounds of controversy. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-45721-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
